Almost every blog has a section where it is displayed on what date a particular blog was published. You can either simply display the dates or use fancy buttons or boxes to display them. You must have seen such WordPress date buttons on very attractive blog themes. In order to create a neat looking WordPress date button you need to understand the workings of the date function of WordPress and even PHP. The entire process of creating nifty WordPress date buttons is explained in this blog post.

It is recommended that you should always upgrade your copy of WordPress whenever they release a new version because the new versions carry critical patches and may too have many new features that you can use to your advantage. For instance, the latest version (WordPress 2.3) takes care of the duplicate content problem (look under Canonical Redirection) that causes SEO woes for many webmasters and bloggers. I’ve been trying to tweak my .htaccess file to solve this but my blog wouldn’t load. I left it as it is then. Now I’ll upgrade to the latest version and see if it solves the problem.

Upgrading to the latest WordPress version is not as big a problem as it seems and even if you don’t know what folders to change and what not to change, you can easily do the following steps to upgrade your copy of WordPress.

• Take your database backup. Since WordPress uses MySQL you can use PHPMyAdmin to take you backup, or you can use any of the plugins available: I guess you should already have the plugin.
• Download the latest version of WordPress and unzip it to a folder.
• From there, delete the wp-content folder and wp-config.php file.
• Upload the entire thing to the remote folder that has your WordPress installation.
• Run http://www.yourblogname.com/you-blog-folder/wp-admin/upgrade.php

This should seamlessly upgrade your WordPress installation.

Are you using WordPress to run your blog? Although it is one of the greatest blogging tools available on the Internet, it needs some tweaking too before you can optimize its performance. For instance, you can do some tweaking to make your blog posts load faster and your backend database leaner. Here is a blog post that suggests you 17 tweaks to accelerate your WordPress blog.

I think the current version of WordPress doesn’t force you to have a .htaccess file. I remember the older versions needed you to have a .htaccess file if you want search engine friendly, longer URLs generated for your blog posts. Anyway, in order to stop WordPress comment spammers using the method mentioned in Banning a WordPress Spammer With .htaccess, even if you don’t have a .htaccess file in your root directory, create one using Notepad or any other text editor.